Sam! You seem like someone who has more social media etiquette knowledge than me- I have a dear brickspace friend on my Tumblr feed who reblogs a lot of doom’n’gloom political stuff, which upsets me when I see it. I got tumblr blacklist/XKit and it catches about 80% of the stuff I don’t want to see on my feed. But sometimes they reblog twitter screenshots that don’t get caught in my filter because it’s not tagged appropriately. How can I talk to them about it without coming off as a priss?
That’s rough! I think you could probably just say to them, “Hey, look, the political stuff you reblog is really important, but I struggle with how much of it there is, and I’m having a hard time reading your tumblr. Is there a tag you could put on all of that stuff? It’s okay if not, but for my own mental health I’m going to need to unfollow you if that’s the case.” I think framing it as “This is something I’m dealing with, and I’m ready to take steps if you can’t, I just don’t want to hurt your feelings” always helps – it’s less accusatory and more about your reaction than their behavior.
Tumblr really needs a mute function. ‘I don’t want to unfollow you, I don’t want to have to go find you again, but I need you to not spam my dash with this stuff, and I’m going to take care of it so you don’t have to worry about it.“. It would be useful for everything from a hyperfixation to a sports event to those occasional dogpiles you have no dog in that just happen on this weirdass site.
I’ve managed pretty well using xkit’s blacklist function, although of course that doesn’t work on mobile. There have been one or two times when someone’s been posting a lot of something untagged or erratically tagged, and I’ve just blacklisted their username for a few days. Of course, that’s presuming the username isn’t like, a super common noun or something.
If you’re approximately 400 years old, you might do what I do and use an RSS reader to follow people’s tumblrs. It only gets tricky around the spookytiems and other times that people change their usernames